So when looking at list view where I can see cover, artist, album, genre, year - the default is to list by year. So as I add the year to all my album directories - my lists are all sorted by year (earliest to latest).

This doesn't really make sense from a usability perspective. If the user browsing by letter on the main menu, the user has an established navigation mental model to expect information to be organized alphabetically.

The beauty is that you can change how the list is sorted by clicking on the arrows for each column. However this gets reset to year as I navigate from letter to letter.